We
decided to leave the Peruvian coast and head in to the Andes mountains, to a
particular spot called Huascarán National Park.
The drive inland was incredible.
We passed through several small towns and began seeing the mountains
ahead!
Pretty
soon we were in the mountains, and driving up, up up…
The
locals were out with their donkeys!
After
several hours of winding up and down mountains, and tons of amazing views, we
had passed “cordillera negra”. We were
faced with the “cordillera blanca” in front of us – so named for the white caps
on these even higher mountians!
That was
where we were headed – and it was getting COLD!
We
drove on and on, with a quick stop in Huaraz for lunch, and pretty soon we were
at an elevation where not much grows but these weird spikey plants…
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| Puya Raimondi |
We had
driven, in one day, from sea level all the way to 5300 meters. We hadn’t
thought about it, but when the altitude sickness began kicking in, we realized
that maybe such a drastic change in elevation wasn’t a good idea… We were both feeling dizzy and weak. It was hard to breathe.
We
continued driving through the park. We
came across some ancient drawings on the rocks.
Looking
for a good spot to park for the night, we ended up driving farther than we
intended. We were actually at 5400
meters when we finally stopped, above the elevation of the glacier we would
visit the next day! The views were
beautiful, but it was a rough night…
By the
time we went to bed, we had headaches and were feeling exhausted. It was freezing cold, too. I don’t think either of us slept that
night…Ricardo even swears he was hallucinating.
I had never had altitude sickness before, but now I know that it’s no
joke!
The next morning, we got up and headed to the
glacier, feeling tired because of the lack of sleep and still suffering
somewhat from the altitude. Oh, and did
I mention how cold it was? It began
snowing and sleeting during the morning on the way to the Pastoruri Glacier.
It
kept snowing, sleeting, and raining on and off that day, but luckily in between the sun would come
out, and we ended up with some amazing pictures to remember our visit! Pastoruri Glacier is rapidly disappearing but still an incredible sight.
Pastoruri
glacier… I’ll let the pictures tell the story.
We got
back to the car mid-afternoon and saw that we had a flat tire. Ricardo patched it up quickly – we’ve gotten
used to things like this on the trip!
Tire
fixed, we knew that we needed to get down to a lower elevation – neither of us
wanted to spend another sleepless night!
We made our way out of the park.
We made it down to about 5000 meters and immediately felt a
difference. Look at the amazing view as
we left the park…
It
turned out that even outside of the park, although farther from those snowy
peaks, we still had a great view. We
parked alongside the road to spend the night. I hiked up the nearby hill in the morning and enjoyed
being in this incredible place. Look at Cubby in the pictures below -
Later
in the afternoon we packed up and drove on.
The cold and the altitude forced our stay to be a short one, but it was
truly breathtaking…what a place!
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| Goodbye Huascaran! |
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